| Title | GEOTHERMAL ENERGY AND ETHICAL RISK ASSESSMENT |
|---|---|
| Authors | M. Krieger |
| Year | 2019 |
| Conference | New Zealand Geothermal Workshop |
| Keywords | |
| Abstract | From ancient times, people have been exploring the planet for some useful materials. This search has been more than successful: coil, oil and gas became very important world’s commodities. Their use however has not done any good to the ecological equilibrium. Today we are exploring other alternative energy sources and one of them – geothermal energy – presents the enormous undiscovered energy deposit our planet has to offer. No matter what kind of resources we use, our continued reliance on the renewable energy should be safe first. Though replacing fossil fuels with geothermal could be beneficial in many ways, it could also lead to negative outcomes. It is in our responsibility to regulate the technology in an ethical way and assess the consequences so that welfare of the individuals and the society are considered. The paper is based on a master thesis successfully defended at the Ruhr-University Bochum in Bochum, Germany in June 2018. The goal is to identify, analyze and evaluate the objective risks in different geothermal technologies according to their harm potential by means of historical evidence analysis and analog records methods. Risks are assessed regarding their causes, consequences and likelihoods for which the comparison-based evaluation is used. The research is embedded in the ethical framework: since geothermal risks are generally imposed on other people rather than personally taken the essential conditions of risk acceptability are characterized. The paper reveals what potential geothermal risks should we be aware of and which of them could result in graver harms. The outcome of the risk assessment makes it possible to answer the question what risks could be deemed acceptable from an ethical point of view and what not. |